On top of Pixar Renderman, V-Ray and Renderman compatible renderers, Golaem Crowd 1.4 now brings its fast crowd rendering techniques to studios using Mental Ray, thanks to native .mi files export and a dedicated procedural rendering plug-in. Both Mental Ray standalone and Mental Ray for Maya are now supported.

Golaem Crowd 1.4 brings the ability to declare characters as geometry instances in order to allow rendering of thousands of entities with amazing performances. French VFX studio Mikros Image used this new Geometry Instancing technique to fill a stadium in the last Nissan Juke commercial. When asked about Golaem Crowd, Christophe Huchet, VFX producer says, “The shots were very short, with a blurry background (because of motion blur, or just to put more emphasis on the Nissan Juke), so we had to make the stadium population process very simple and straightforward.”

Guillaume Para, VFX artist adds, “Depending on shots, we had to generate between 5,000 and 12,000 characters. I was amazed by how fast it is to render using procedural rendering, and how easy it is to set up a shot once assets are ready. I am thrilled to try next Golaem Crowd releases."

Golaem Crowd 1.4 is compatible with Autodesk Maya 2011, 2012 and 2013 for Windows and Linux.